The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

by Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips

When researchers started really digging into empathy in the early 1900s, there were two commonly accepted types: instinctive and intellectual. Instinctive empathy involved an uncontrollable emotional reaction to someone else’s experience—crying when someone else cries, for example, or blushing with secondhand embarrassment. Intellectual empathy was more distant: recognizing someone else’s emotion but not feeling it yourself. These two terms eventually morphed into the two that are most commonly accepted today: cognitive empathy (understanding another person’s mental state) and affective empathy (responding emotionally to the other person’s mental state—i.e., sharing their feelings).